by Andre Brink
She has brought the small hand-mirror with her, but these past three days she's been too tired to use it at night, too busy in the morning preparing for the new day's trek. A plodding pace, but exhausting enough. Her body aches. Sometimes she can feel her stomach contracting in small cramps, perspiration breaking out on her face. She has maintained her nightly ablutions, of course, even if it meant that Adam had to lug the bucket of water for a mile or more—with that arrogant sneer on his face which frightens and infuriates her, and makes her powerless. But washing herself like that, hidden behind bushes, has been a furtive and perfunctory affair, simply to cool off and to rid herself of the worst grime of the day, no more, however passionate in her the urge for abundant water. (The mulberry stains, the stripes along my legs.)
This afternoon she felt too tired to go on. He probably noticed it, although he didn’t say a word; and when they reached this stream he stopped to outspan. She could feel the resentment in him. He has the sea in him now—the sea!—like her. But she can’t go on like this. Now he has gone in search of wood to make a fire and build a shelter for the night. She watched him walk off with his thongs, far across the next row of hills; and then she came down here—“For God's sake keep the pistol with you!”—where she could guess the secret water. Knelt down on the broad flat rock, pressing her face in cupped hands brimful of water. Now she looks down at herself, into her own eyes, an obscurer blue than usual, but that may be due to the water. Moist hair clinging to her face; dust on her temples, in spite of that first immersion; thin lines of mud running down her cheeks. Are her cheekbones more angular, has she lost weight?
“Is that me?” she hears her own voice asking, strangely wondering. “And if it's me—who am I?”
For it suddenly strikes her, like panic: that she should be here, she. In the Cape, on the social rounds inspired by her mother, she was well known—it was all one small, gossipy family—and instantly recognized at parties or balls: over there in the mustard dress, that's Elisabeth, you know, the daughter of the Company's keeper of stores; her mother is from Batavia. And on their journey: the wife of the white explorer. Now, quite suddenly, there is no one in terms of whom she can be recognized. No one, only herself, here at the water; in this space through which the late birds fly. What am I doing here? Who is this I who looks like this? She peers at the reflection, fumbling with her fichu: the delicate white lace is red with moist clinging dust; the stiff edges of her white cuffs, attached to the amber sleeves with bows at the elbows, are drooping and dirty. She wants to deny herself; she refuses to look like this. She is too pale, and from lack of sleep last night there are shadows under her eyes. She tries to rub them off with water, but in vain.
Impulsively she gets up and goes back up the hill to make quite sure. There is indeed no sign of him. He's gone far away, it should take an hour or more before he brings the wood. She is completely alone. It hits her in the pit of her stomach in a luxurious onrush of anguish. In the past, whenever he went away, the camp remained around her, the wagon a familiar tortoise shell. Even the day following Larsson's disappearance her isolation was not as complete as this, for she was expecting him to turn up at any moment: and previously, on their journey, there had always been somebody in the vicinity. After all, one couldn’t leave a woman alone in the bush.
Returning to the water where, thoughtlessly, she has left the pistol with her shoes and the neat clean bundle of clothes, she looks down at herself once more, now standing, farther removed from her face, separated from it by the crumpled folds of her dress.
Her feet are dirty. She lifts the dress to her knees and wades into the water, cool round her calves; soft squelchy mud stirring under her soles and slithering between her toes. Her fear subsides, changes. She allows the hem of the dress to drop down into the water, feeling its slow sogging weight tug at her. She is alone. Undoing her fichu, she remains standing for a moment, her hands covering the décolleté of her dress in numb and sensual guilt. Then, with hurried determination, she unfastens the ribbons of her bodice and pushes the dress down over her hips into the water, allowing it to drift round her knees in a wet mass, sinking slowly. She steps out of the petticoats, freeing herself with small deliberate kicks. The clothes remain motionless on the shallow muddy bed, unaffected by the gentle movement of the water. She wades in deeper, feeling the greedy caressing coolness reach up over her knees and the sensitive insides of her thighs, past her hips and the gentle curve of her belly, until it reaches her breasts. In sudden exultation she dives in. Emerging again, feeling the heaviness of her wet dark hair, she swims across. Only after a long time does she return to the rock to fetch the soap and wash herself, then immerses herself once more in the voluptuous innocence of the water.
She has no desire to get dressed again; the day is still warm in the late sun. On the flat rock glowing with inner warmth she stretches out, her body pressed against the burning stone, cleansed and glistening wet, strangely moved, and moaning with urgent passion; turning on her back and tense, with knees drawn up, touching herself, caressing herself, opening, moistening, heaving, assuaging the violence of her need, swaying her head from side to side, bringing herself to ecstasy, hearing her own voice crying out, subsiding into silence with a final sob.
After a very long time she rises and, astride on the edge of the rock, surveys her reflection once again with brooding wonder. The face with its burning eyes, the small breasts rather fuller than they used to be, the nipples tender to the touch of her fingertips and the aureoles slightly—just slightly— darker; the gentle beginning of a belly swelling, the small tight angle of love-hair above the swollen suture of her still distended sex: all these things which are she and which she hasn’t studied so intently for months, all of it suddenly inexplicable: beautiful, strange, vaguely terrifying. Are these the contours of myself ? And if something changes, if my breasts should swell and my belly bulge, my hands grow thinner, if my sex should ripen like a fruit, or my ribs become more visible: will it make any difference to that self, does it expand or shrink accordingly? Where does it reside, that elusive I? Above me, unquestioning, unanswerable, the sky, the white clouds slowly drifting, and the sun; around me stones and red earth, grass and tangled brushwood.
Subdued, she kneels and reaches for the sodden clothes; but leaning far forward to grasp them from the water, she catches a glimpse of a movement on the far side of the pool and stops, petrified. Sick with shock, she is too scared to look immediately: but when she finally manages to lift her head—thin droplets running from her hair and moving like a shudder down her shoulders and her back—it is only a duiker, a small doe with long wide ears and enormous eyes, staring back at her, quite motionless. There is something in the silence of that gaze which strips her more naked than the removal of her clothes has done, exposing her in her total vulnerability, moving her so deeply that she wants to cry. On long, delicate legs the doe stands motionless, reflected in the water, surrounded by the bush: and it is as if, in those great black eyes, earth and water, sky and world are all transformed into primordial, guileless staring. Amongst the trees of the garden I hid myself because I was naked.
Unable to do anything else, she raises her hands to cover her breasts, and the wet dress plunges back into the water.
Instantly—a single sweep of movement, a flickering of light—the little doe turns round and disappears. Gone, as if it has never been there at all.
With practical haste Elisabeth gets up, puts on the clean clothes she has brought with her, tying up ribbons, fastening hooks. The broad lace cuffs covering her forearms irritate her. She tears them loose and flings them away. With great care she tucks the dress in round her legs and kneels down to finish her washing.
He is gathering wood. The long collarless jacket hangs from a branch, tattered by thorns; the waistcoat was discarded on the very first day of their trek. Wearing only the pants and the dirty white shirt with its elaborate lacework, he piles up the branches he has gathered. The smooth hills of the past few days h
ave risen slowly to a final sharp ridge with scaly cliffs close by. Below, the slope is almost bare of vegetation, the grass yellower than before, a different climate; further on it fans open into gently ribbed plains more even than the country they have passed through so far. Two more days—three, perhaps, with her—to the Hottentot village where he sometimes stops over. He has meant to go much farther today, down this long slope at the very least; but she tires more easily than he has expected. She probably won’t admit anything herself, but he noticed the pale circle round her mouth and, after last night, sleepless in the drizzle, in the dark patches under her eyes. Now they’re camped beyond the ridge, up there, near the stream.
Tonight they’ll need less shelter than in last night's rain, when everything had to be unpacked so that they could cover themselves and their most precious possessions, the ammunition and her books, with the skins. Even so they were drenched. Three days now. It's different from the time they spent in the camp among the wild figs: they are more closely together day and night, separated only by the fire when it's dark. And she must be aware of him watching her.
—I’m watching you. This is our first night on trek; it is, indeed, something of a first night. I’m watching you, and I want you. With all the accumulated frustrated lust in me I’m aching for you, I want to grab you and feel you against my body, invade your silence. All I have to do is to stretch my arm across the fire and touch you. Are you asleep, or merely pretending? Are you aware of me? Dare you be aware?
So why don’t I? Is it because of the child in you? But why should that deter me? Your body is still light, there's barely a hint of swelling. Would anyone have spared my mother for the sake of the child in her womb?—
My white master of the past, appointed by God: to him the world lay open and the law was silent. He had his wife, he had access to all that was white—but also to us, quite freely. All those trips on the wine wagon to the Cape. We used to finish off-loading early in the afternoon, then hang around the taverns—I waiting on the wagon— until sunset, the dark time when the white men were allowed into the women's quarters in the slave lodge. To improve the quality of the local slaves, they explained. A necessary service. Half an hour; then the watchman with his lantern made the rounds, time gentlemen, and locked up for the night.
Don’t ask so many questions, my mother said. Don’t ask. At peace with the world in her dumb, serene way. She never bothered to understand, why should she? Her people had all died in the Great Sickness—if she had to die as well, let it be so—and only the handful of children were brought back by the hunters, and booked in, and taught about the Lord-thy-God of the House of Bondage, meekly resigning themselves to it all. Sitting quietly against the kitchen wall puffing at her pipe, that frail body with the bird-like wrists and ankles, a girl, a waif, it seemed in passing. But a mother: mine. Wrinkles covering her face from early adulthood. My people age easily, it's like a dam drying up, mud cracking. But Heitsi-Eibib always rises again on the dusty plains, she assured me: you’ll live again. Praise the Lord.
You must be taking after your grandmother, she said. Your father's folk. It's always them landing in trouble for being so unruly. For talking and wondering and asking too many questions. That's why. What's the use of questions, hey? No peace of mind, that's for sure. We’re all under the same yoke, accept it. It's only when you grow too old to be useful, like your Grandmother Seli, that you’re freed to die. Until that day comes God and the Baas will provide for me.
Seli, my Grandmother Seli, tell me your stories, I want to know where I come from.
On the slopes of Padang, she said, one finds the touch-me-not, shrub upon shrub as far as the eye can see. You touch one slender leaf, and the shudder spreads across that whole wide slope, curling up all the myriads of trembling leaves. Don’t let them touch you, my boy. You close yourself up tight. Remember your Grandfather Afrika: now that's a man in our eyes. Didn’t utter a sound when they tore the flesh from his body with the red-hot tongs. Didn’t bat an eyelid when they broke his bones on the wheel. I took him water that night—he didn’t want anything to eat—and the sun was out before he died. Don’t worry, he told me that night. He found it difficult to speak by then, but he never groaned once. Don’t worry about the pain. There's only one thing that counts, and that is not to give in. Never to give in to them. You got to go on.
Let them hurt me now, he said. That's even better. You see, if you want to hurt a man you must know he's there. You can’t hurt a man who's not there. In dying I become a man.
And do bring some wood from the mountain when you go up again, said Grandmother Seli. The days are getting cold, and I’m not so young any more. Is it tomorrow you going up?
Yes, I said, it's tomorrow I’m going up for wood. I’ll bring you some, don’t worry.
But in the early morning the Baas stopped me. Don’t bother about the wood today, he said, I need you on the wine-wagon. Someone else can go for wood.
Was it my fault she died the next day, frozen to death in her windy shack on the Lion's Rump?
It was exactly two days later I heard my mother singing in the dry vineyard where she was pruning with the other slaves. “Rock of Ages cleft for me”, like the white people had taught her.
—Thou shalt not, thou shalt not: and opposite those dull red coals she's pretending to be asleep. She's woman, though she's white. Who knows but that she's burning for it too? So what restrains me? It's only her and me in this wide world, no one will know or care: does a tree care if a bird's nest falls from it? Does wood care if it burns?
Or is it the very fact that we’re alone, that there's nothing beyond her I can violate? There's nothing I can avenge myself on. Only silence. And her closed eyes. And, if I listen breathlessly, her quiet breathing.
How can she be so peaceful? Is it because she knows I’m keeping watch against the beasts? Because she knows I’m taking her to the sea? How does she know? Because she believes me, because she has no choice but to believe me? Because she's wholly in my hands?
I can take your body and force it and break it, I can tear a scream from it: a scream of life like that other scream of death. But even so you’ll be untouchable. Your eyes. Somewhere inside your body, beyond my reach, you have secured yourself in your whiteness. Perhaps I hate you too much.—
Then I took her smooth dark body in the dark, surrounded by the breathing of all those others, animals or moving hills. Her sea-smell. And the warm milk-bushes of the beach. I love you; I love you. And her gentle open palms on my shoulders after the grasp of her nails has slackened, the movement of her cheek against my neck. What is it that makes it happen? Body into body, that's easy, and quick, and done. But this: you and I, world without end? And less than a month later the Baas sold her. Good price, 400 rixdollars. Of course, she was very young.
He drags the bundles of wood back to where the oxen are grazing, and begins to construct a rough shelter of branches. Inside, a small hollow cleared for the fire. They still have salted half-dried strips of meat. While he is working, she approaches from the stream in her fresh blue dress, her hair still damp, and spreads the washing on her shrubs.
“Still tired?” he asks, in spite of himself.
“Not really. I had a swim.” He looks at her. And she goes on talking, trying to hide her embarrassment at the memory, her consciousness of him.
“There was a little doe, I suppose it came to drink. It gave me such a fright. At first I thought it was a lion or something.”
“You’ve been traveling for months. Aren’t you used to the land yet?”
“Does one ever get used to it? He was always there to protect me.” She always refers to him as “he”.
“You should have stayed in the Cape.”
She shakes her head with suppressed violence.
He starts breaking firewood. “Then you wouldn’t have been here now. In a shelter like this. You must be used to something rather different.”
She shrugs.
“What did your house look l
ike?” he asks, as if he hopes to force a secret out of her.
“Why do you want to know?” She sits down on a fallen trunk. “Thatched roof. White walls. A large garden.”
“Big house?”
“Two stories. Yes, it was big.”
“You had your own room.”
“Of course.”
“Of course!”
“Why do you always ask about the Cape?” she demands suspiciously.
“What else is there to talk about?”
“But you never seem to be satisfied. What on earth could I tell you which would interest you?”
“You’re scared to tell me anything. You want to keep it all to yourself. You think I’m a slave.”
“You are a slave.”
“Not here.”
“How can a place make any difference to what you are?”
“I was kept as a slave. I never was a slave,” he says, smoldering.
“And then you ran away?”
He shrugs.
“Why did you run away? You always question me. I’ve also got a right to know.”
“Who gave you that right?” He looks at her in rage. She feels an urge to cover her breasts with her hands again, as she did when the buck gazed at her, but she is too afraid.
“All right,” he relents, unexpectedly. “I’ll tell you.” As he breaks a branch on a large stone a splinter cuts into his palm and he curses. “My master was a wine farmer, you see. In Hottentot's Holland. Made a lot of brandy too. He used to say it was the best in the Cape. He drank so much of it himself, one might well believe him. Whenever he was in a stupor he forgot to lock up the barrel. So I helped myself too. My people are made like that. In the end I decided it was better to run off, before the temptation killed me.”
